IT'S obligatory in any review of a Bond game to mention the seminal GoldenEye, which even a decade on remains the benchmark for any release featuring England's deadliest weapon. No, this isn't the new Martini, but Quantum of Solace makes the most of the lucrative movie tie-in (the film opens today, too) and provides some decent set-piece shooting along the way.

Ushering you through key scenes from the film (and adding some from Casino Royale, for a little variety), you spend much of the time running between cover, pausing to admire Daniel Craig's well-realised craggy profile, before sticking your weapon out into the open and picking off some anonymous bad guys.

As well as the always satisfying sniper rifle, there are many opportunities for triggering nasty environmental accidents to dispatch your foes. My favourite so far is severing a precariously attached church bell and watching it crush several ill-positioned enemies beneath. Injurylawyers.com could have a field day.

The production values are high, with some impressive voice acting and digitised likenesses, and much of the bounding and blasting is nicely paced, yet the narrowly defined path you're forced to follow and the repeating pattern of hide, shoot, scurry and oooh, it's the stealth bit now, makes it hard to get too excited. Maybe the online multi-player options could save it if enough folks took it to their hearts, which reminds me…

My old mate Hardcore John has this theory that you can't judge Bond games by the same standards you would of other First Person Shooters. There's something about stepping into the tasteful footwear of the suave super spy that impels you to overlook any number of faults and simply enjoy the thrill of playing as your boyhood hero. I'm not convinced (though the huge sales of some truly dire 007 games suggests he's correct) but this is a competent, if largely uninspiring, effort and certainly more entertaining than most of the licensed dross of recent years.

It's just that if you can opt for the excellent Bioshock, which PS3 owners can now marvel at, or Far Cry 2 (we've only spent one night together but I think it's love), then surely you'd have to be as besotted with Bond as Miss Moneypenny to go for this instead?

IN timely relation to the upcoming American presidential elections, Fracture is a tale of future civil war in the USA that sees East fighting West and generally disagreeing over whether DNA manipulation or cybernetics are the best route for mankind's self-imposed evolution. Of course such questions aren't on the table for McCain and Obama, but they could be, one day.

With such a hokum plot (even for the trashy end of video games), Fracture isn't here to tug at the heartstrings or win awards for voice acting – it's here to try out a new mechanic, to moderate effect.

Many games base their existence round one central mechanic – be it Portal's dimension bending gun or PsyOps' telekinetic powers. Without these core elements the games themselves wouldn't exist. Fracture was pitched by Lucas Arts as the next great mechanic – real-time terrain deformation.

Allowing you to physically alter the landscape by merely shooting it with some magical ground swelling/swallowing weapon, Fracture gives you the tools to change the battlefield on the fly, creating cover for yourself and using the ground itself as a weapon to disrupt or destroy the enemy.

That in itself should be a wonderful mechanic, if potentially unbalanced, but the execution and follow-up required to expand something from a gimmick to a game defining mechanic is missing, turning Fracture into an average shooter with a neat but underworked idea.

It's also fiercely derivative, looking like a day-glo Unreal cast-off with slapped on Gears of War mechanics, right down to a shoddily implemented "roadie run".

The potential for puzzling is also here too, in the same way that Half Life 2 riffed on physics, but in reality the imagination gone into the game merely extends to little more than raising the ground to get to out-of-reach places or lowering it to reveal tunnels.

It's as if they got scared of being too different, worried that terrain deformation might be too radical for the masses and settled for a sci-fi shooter with woolly combat, an identity crisis and some underworked ideas. Hopefully unlike whoever wins in America next week.